Climate Denialists on the Ropes

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it:
“I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the
Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was
supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent
advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers,
tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these
guys had over-reached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000
in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the
insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally
friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim
Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual
conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin
Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done:
Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way
down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there
were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe
Bast, complained
that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and
disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which
was both a little rich—after all, he was the guy with the
mass-murderer billboards—but also a little pathetic. A whimper had
replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

That pugnaciousness may return: Mr. Bast said
last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was
building a new small-donor base that was “Greenpeace-proof,” and that in
any event the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had
“generated more than $5 million in earned media so far.” (That’s a bit
like saying that for a successful White House bid John Edwards should
have had more mistresses and babies because look at all the publicity!)
Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense,
Bast is correct: this tiny collection of deniers has actually been
incredibly effective over the past years.

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied
on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on
their websites.

The best of them—and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the
website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With
That—have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the
inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had
much to work with. Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in
the denialist camp. That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing
for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as
almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times
detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is
basically shot. Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied
on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on
their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English
peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop
saying he’s a member) began
his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no
scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.

He’s proved the truth of that claim many times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career when he explained to readers of the American Spectator
that "there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire
population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for
life.” His personal contribution to the genre of climate-change
mass-murderer analogies has been to explain that a group of young
climate-change activists who tried to take over a stage where he was
speaking were “Hitler Youth.”

One reason the denialists’ campaign has been so successful, of
course, is that they’ve also managed to intimidate the other side.

Or consider Lubos Motl, a Czech theoretical physicist who has never
published on climate change but nonetheless keeps up a steady stream of
web assaults on scientists he calls “fringe kibitzers who want to become
universal dictators” who should “be thinking how to undo your
inexcusable behavior so that you will spend as little time in prison as
possible.” On the crazed killer front, Motl said that, while he
supported many of Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik’s ideas, it was hard
to justify gunning down all those children—still, it did demonstrate
that “right-wing people... may even be more efficient while killing—and the probable reason is that Breivik may have a higher IQ than your
garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.”

If your urge is to laugh at this kind of clown show, the joke’s on
you—because it’s worked. I mean, James Inhofe, the Oklahoma
Republican who has emerged victorious in every Senate fight on climate
change, cites Motl regularly; Monckton has testified four times before
the U.S. Congress.

Morano, one of the most skilled political operatives of the age—he “broke the story”
that became the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry—plays rough: he
regularly publishes the email addresses of those he pillories, for
instance, so his readers can pile on the abuse. But he plays smart, too.
He’s a favorite of Fox News and of Rush Limbaugh, and he and his
colleagues have used those platforms to make it anathema for any
Republican politician to publicly express a belief in the reality of
climate change.

Take Newt Gingrich, for instance. Only four years ago he was willing to sit on a love seat with Nancy Pelosi and film a commercial
for a campaign headed by Al Gore. In it he explained that he agreed
with the California Congresswoman and then-Speaker of the House that the
time had come for action on climate. This fall, hounded by Morano, he
was forced to recant again and again. His dalliance with the truth
about carbon dioxide hurt him more among the Republican faithful than
any other single “failing.” Even Mitt Romney, who as governor of
Massachusetts actually took some action on global warming, has now been reduced to claiming that scientists may tell us “in fifty years” if we have anything to fear.

In other words, a small cadre of fervent climate-change deniers took
control of the Republican party on the issue. This, in turn, has meant
control of Congress, and since the president can’t sign a treaty by
himself, it’s effectively meant stifling any significant international
progress on global warming. Put another way, the various right wing billionaires and energy companies who have bankrolled this stuff have gotten their money’s worth many times over.

One reason the denialists’ campaign has been so successful, of
course, is that they’ve also managed to intimidate the other side. There
aren’t many senators who rise with the passion or frequency of James
Inhofe but to warn of the dangers of ignoring what’s really happening on
our embattled planet.

It’s a striking barometer of intimidation that Barack Obama, who has a
clear enough understanding of climate change and its dangers, has
barely mentioned the subject for four years. He did show a little leg
to his liberal base in Rolling Stoneearlier this spring
by hinting that climate change could become a campaign issue. Last
week, however, he passed on his best chance to make good on that promise
when he gave a long speech on energy at an Iowa wind turbine factory without even mentioning
global warming. Because the GOP has been so unreasonable, the President
clearly feels he can take the environmental vote by staying silent,
which means the odds that he’ll do anything dramatic in the next four
years grow steadily smaller.

On the brighter side, not everyone has been intimidated. In fact, a
spirited counter-movement has arisen in recent years. The very same
weekend that Heartland tried to put the Unabomber’s face on global
warming, 350.org conducted thousands of rallies around the globe to show who climate change really affects. In a year of mobilization, we also managed to block—at least temporarily—the Keystone pipeline
that would have brought the dirtiest of dirty energy, tar-sands oil,
from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Gulf Coast. In the
meantime, our Canadian allies are fighting hard to block a similar
pipeline that would bring those tar sands to the Pacific for export.

Similarly, in just the last few weeks, hundreds of thousands have signed on to demand an end to fossil-fuel subsidies. And new polling data
already show more Americans worried about our changing climate, because
they’ve noticed the freakish weather of the last few years and drawn
the obvious conclusion.

But damn, it’s a hard fight, up against a ton of money and a ton of
inertia. Eventually, climate denial will “lose,” because physics and
chemistry are not intimidated even by Lord Monckton. But timing is
everything—if he and his ilk, a crew of certified planet wreckers,
delay action past the point where it can do much good, they’ll be able
to claim one of the epic victories in political history—one that will
last for geological epochs.

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